Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club
In 1926, the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club was established to give a forum both for the writers who were flocking to the Pacific coast and their readers.
In the period after the Second World War, with L.A.’s Jewish population burgeoning, the club drew more than 200 people to its weekly meetings to hear the local stars of Yiddish culture and visiting luminaries read from their work and entertain.
In 1946, the Club’s president, Israel Friedland, wrote on the occasion of the club’s 20th anniversary and the establishment of its new center and described the origin of the club in the first issue of the club’s new literary journal, Kheshbn (Reckoning):
Twenty years ago [in 1926], when a profoundly acrimonious feud had begun dividing the Jewish street between the political orientations of “Left” and “Right,” a small group of nonpartisan people interested in culture, not wanting to be ground between the millstones of the so-called party conflict, decided to establish a Jewish, supra-partisan culture club, where a culturally-involved Jewish person would be able to spend time in a Jewish atmosphere and enjoy himself in a culturally lively way.
At that time, the L.A. Yiddish Culture Club tapped into a number of intellectual forces, which were free of partisan loyalties but had a deep devotion to the Yiddish word and to Yiddish culture and its creators. The culture program of the club gradually crystalized later, taking on its distinct character or essence: not bound to any particular party or order and not under the supervision of any central cultural entity, the Culture Club — for all of these years of its existence — led a uniquely independent cultural venture.
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